13 Aug 2015

The list of accepted papers in EMNLP 2015 is now available at accepted papers

Natlang students Ramtin and Maryam have the following long paper accepted at EMNLP 2015:

Improving Statistical Machine Translation with a Multilingual Paraphrase Database Abstract : The multilingual Paraphrase Database (PPDB) is a freely available automatically created resource of paraphrases in multiple languages. In statistical machine translation, paraphrases can be used to provide translation for out-of-vocabulary (OOV) phrases. In this paper, we show that a graph propagation approach that uses PPDB paraphrases can be used to improve overall translation quality. We provide an extensive comparison with previous work and show that our PPDB-based method improves the BLEU score by up to 1.79 percent points. We show that our approach improves on the state of the art in three different settings: when faced with limited amount of parallel training data; a domain shift between training and test data; and handling a morphologically complex source language. Our PPDB-based method outperforms the use of distributional profiles from monolingual source data.

Out of 1315 valid submissions, only 312 were accepted, which gives an acceptance rate of 24% for EMNLP 2015.

Congratulations to Ramtin, Maryam and Anoop.